Review Articles

In the wake of the Leonidas 93 Review Articles In the Wake of the Leonidas reflections on Indo-Fijian indenture historiography Doug Munro Abstract The historiography of Indo-Fijian indenture came into its own with the publication of Ken Gillion’s Fiji’s Indian Migrants in 1962. A work of ‘balanced’ scholarship, it contrasts with the more ‘emotional’ A New System of Slavery (1974) by Hugh Tinker, which places greater stress on the iniquities of the indenture system. These two texts set the terms of discussion when the centenary of the arrival of Indian indentured labourers in Fiji, in 1979, gave impetus to further study by historians from the University of the South Pacific, notably Ahmed Ali, Vijay Naidu and Brij V Lal. This article evaluates the ongoing state of scholarship and asks why the momentum has not been maintained. Keywords Fiji; historiography; indenture; Indians; Indo-Fijians; plantations The Journal of Pacific Studies, Volume 28, no.1, 2005, 93–117 © by JPacS Editorial Board (SSED,USP) 93 94 The Journal of Pacific Studies Vol.28 no.1, 2005 NEW ZEALAND OBSERVED 1940 as a centenary, Australia marked a bicentenary in 1988, and 1992 was remembered with flourishes as the Columbus quincentenary. Temporal markers such as these are celebrated and, additionally, they serve to provide the impetus for historical research. That is what happened in Fiji in 1979 with the centenary of the arrival, on the Leonidas, of the first 463 Indian indentured labourers (girmitiya) to Fiji. The centenary celebrations included a round of festivities and commemorations, as well as special issues of newspapers. Not only this, though. There was also a flowering of historical and creative writing on the Indo-Fijian indenture experience. The 125th anniversary of girmit in 2004 saw a minor flourish, mostly in the form of reprints of books from the previous generation, but nothing to compare with the veritable cascade of enthusiasm and scholarship that marked 1979. This recent crop of publications, however, does provide a pretext for reflection on the state of indenture studies in Fiji. Some 61,000 girmitiya arrived in Fiji between 1879 and 1916. They were a tiny proportion of the 1.2 million or so other Indians who, between 1834 and 1916, went on contracts of indenture to places as far apart as the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, Natal and East Africa. But in a small country, 61,000 is still an appreciable total and their legacy has been considerable. Two features stand out. First, there was a significant minority of women, reflecting the regulation that there had to be 40 female for every 100 male girmitiya (in other words, a 28 per cent female component). Secondly, the girmitiya had settlement rights and the majority took up permanent residence in Fiji. This, in part, reflected another regulation—that they were entitled to repatriation at government expense only after living a further five years in Fiji. Most of the ex-girmitiya could not afford the cost of a voyage home when their term of indenture had expired, and after a further five years they had adjusted to Fiji. So settle they did, forming a ‘separate but unequal’ segment of the population. The separateness was partly their own choice and partly a function of deliberate government policy. Left to fend for themselves, the post-indenture Indians had to establish schools for their children. Politically, they attempted to regain their respect (izzat) following the hell (narak) of plantation life by seeking political equality and (unsuccessfully) demanding a common roll voting system, secure in the knowledge that they would outnumber Fijians and In the wake of the Leonidas 95 Europeans in a matter of decades. Fiji became a so-called plural society, and in some respects the literature, with separate major studies of rural Indians (Mayer 1961) and rural Fijians (Belshaw 1964), reflects this lack of inter-racial integration. The anthropologist Adrian Mayer also published a short book Indians in Fiji, which contained two chapters on the indenture period (1963:13– 32). With impending decolonisation in the late 1960s, political parties were racially defined, and there was soon a literature on the politics of race (e.g. Norton 1977; Mamak 1978). In the same way, there were separate studies of indentured Indian plantation workers and their Melanesian counterparts with, respectively, Ken Gillion’s Fiji’s Indian Migrants (1962) and Owen Parnaby’s Britain and the Labor Trade in the Southwest Pacific (1965a). The dichotomy in the literature was underlined with the appearance in 1973 of Peter Corris’s monograph on the labour migration of indentured Solomon Islanders, some 8,000 of whom worked in Fiji but generally not alongside their Indian counterparts (Corris 1973). The girmitiya were vital to the sugar industry, which was under the monopsonist influence of the Colonial Sugar Refinery Company (CSR). That in itself was critical, because the colonial government depended on the sugar industry, and therefore the CSR, for its solvency and thus had incentive to ignore abuse of the workforce. Plantation workers are always most at risk in operations facing severe profitability constraints, as was the CSR from the mid- 1880s. In any case, indenture is an explicitly coercive arrangement: a worker binds himself to an employer for a lengthy period in return for a wage and other stipulated conditions. In the case of Indians to Fiji, the initial period of indenture was five years; a further five years under indenture entitled the worker to a free return passage, but most took the former option. They were provided with wretchedly appointed accommodation (known as ‘the lines’) and the wage was nominally a shilling a day for men and nine pence for women. But this was eroded by various means and it was not until 1908, or 28 years after the arrival of the first batch of workers on the Leonidas, that girmitiya earned their full shilling a day as a matter of routine. Indenture ostensibly set out mutual rights and obligations between worker and employer but in reality provided criminal punishment for breach of contract by workers. Employers were under the gentler provisions of civil law, hence the indenture 96 The Journal of Pacific Studies Vol.28 no.1, 2005 system’s sometimes being called the penal contract system. The purpose of indentured service was twofold. In providing for a fixed term of service it stabilised the workforce by preventing a high turnover, and at the same time the penal sanctions placed in employers’ hands a blunt instrument of discipline. Add to this the dominance of a large plantation company, a succession of governors who hesitated to oppose the CSR even had they wanted to, a less than impartial colonial judiciary, and a general tenor in white society of contempt towards girmitiya, and the ingredients are in place for a harsh and oppressive variant of the indenture system. The severity of Indo-Fijian indenture has attracted the most attention, from contemporaries as well as from later historians. From the early years of the twentieth century, the Indian indenture system as a whole came under severe criticism from missionaries, humanitarian groups (Garnham 1918) and activists in the Indian nationalist movement. The investigations carried out by the pro-Indian nationalist activists CF Andrews and William Pearson caused an uproar in India, as did the earlier account by the ex-girmitiya Totaram Sanadhya, My Twenty Years in Fiji (Andrews 1918; Andrews & Pearson 1918; Sanadhya 1991). Closer to home, the Methodist missionaries JW Burton and Richard Piper provided critiques (Burton 1909, 1910; Gillion 1962:174), which, disgracefully, their own church disowned in order to allay criticism within Fiji. Apart from two substantial official reports ([Sanderson Committee] 1910; McNeill & Lal 1915), the shortcoming of this corpus of denunciatory literature as historical source material is not so much its partisan outlook as its impressionistic nature: while accurately conveying the strength of feeling against indenture and the entrenched abuses of the system, it is characterised by too much sweeping assertion and too few substantiating data. But it did contribute to the ending of the Indian indenture system by Britain, who was concerned with the larger question that opposition to overseas indenture was eroding the loyalty of Indians to the Empire (Yarwood 1968). The system was terminated in 1916 and in Fiji the remaining contracts of indenture were cancelled on 1 January 1920. It was indeed the end of an era; but incredibly, after all the tumult and shouting of the previous decade, the final erasure of Indo-Fijian indenture was barely mentioned by the Fiji Times. In the wake of the Leonidas 97 Historians were slow to take up the subject—not surprisingly, given that Fiji is among those generally dismissed as small and remote (for which read trivial) places and, more importantly, because Pacific Islands history did not become a distinct academic specialisation until the early 1950s. Sizeable works on the Indian indenture system as a whole had emerged by the 1950s; but they had little or nothing to say about Fiji (Kondapi 1951; Cumpston 1953). The occasional Master’s thesis looked at Fiji (e.g. Colaco 1957) and there were accounts of the extension of Indian indenture to Fiji during Sir Arthur Gordon’s governorship (Cumpston 1956; Legge 1958:167–8). The latter grouping represented a lingering expression of the once-dominant high politics thrust of Pacific Islands historiography, with its concentration on the workings of empire. An account of the Indian indenture system in Fiji as a functioning whole, and how the workers fared within it, was still needed. The decisive historiographical breakthrough came in 1962 with the publication of Ken Gillion’s Fiji’s Indian Migrants (Gillion 1962).

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